


Choose Your Weapons

by navaan



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, Childhood Memories, Foreshadowing, Gen, Gen Fic, Missing Scene, Pre-Avengers (2012), Tony Stark Has Issues, Tony Stark-centric, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-30
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2019-04-14 23:29:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14146989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/pseuds/navaan
Summary: He looked at his hands and tried to steady his breathing.I know, Dad, he thought,I'm not Captain America. I know, I know. But neither were you.In a cave in Afghanistan Tony Stark forms a plan that will make him Iron Man





	Choose Your Weapons

**Author's Note:**

> This is my tribute fic or the _Iron Man_ movie for the Cap-IronMan MCU tribute project for the 10 Years of MCU celebration of the Cap-IM community. Also a fill for my stony bingo card, "cave".

On the first day of consciousness it was hard enough to sit up and watch the surgeon move around the cave. Tony's chest was made up of mind-numbing pain held together barely by flesh and bone. His _ribs_ hurt. Everything hurt. His body was weak, but he was coming around. He had a car battery sitting beside him that was keeping him alive, but that also tied him down more effectively than any chains right now. 

Not only was it heavy and had to be carried around; a battery could run out easily. And this wasn't a car it was powering. Now it was powering his life support. He could recharge it.

The generator the rebels had put into their prison for the work they wanted him to do would do the job for a while. But a generator would only run as long as someone fueled it.

Finite energy.

His own weapons and finite energy would kill him.

Some smart ass journalist or activist out there in the safe civilized world would surely enjoy writing him an obituary that highlighted this irony. It didn't strike Tony as very funny right now. Over the years he'd cultivated his image as a the uncaring billionaire, but he had never actually stopped doing research in all kinds of directions. Obie had just had the superior arguments for why some things simply weren't profitable and his first responsibility was to the company and the Stark legacy.

Now said “Stark legacy” had come to bite him.

_The funny thing is nobody would've been surprised if you'd more or less quietly died in a hotel room? You've walked that edge every time life felt empty and you had to perform anyway to keep up pretensions._

What would his father have said if he could have see him here – sitting on a cot in a cave prison held by the kind of rebels his weapons were supposed to fight? 

He knew. 

_You messed up, Tony. Like you always do. Remember what I told you when you were younger? You may be the smartest person in a room, but you know nothing about the world. What do you know about war or the dangers other people face?_

He looked at his hands and tried to steady his breathing.

 _I know, Dad_ , he thought, _I'm not Captain America. I know, I know. But neither were you._

“Mr. Stark?” 

“Yes,” he answered when the surgeon called his name for what seemed like the second or third time.

He must have drifted.

“You were lost in thought.”

“Yes,” he admitted and looked at the man he owed his life to. Sitting here on this cot flexing his fingers, realizing that this dank cave might just as well become his grave, he remembered something important that he wanted to commit to memory. “I was the only one they took?”

“The only one? Yes, I imagine you were.”

“I rode with three soldiers,” he said and called up the faces. Three young people, now dead. He remembered them joking right up until everything had gone to hell. Who was going to phone their families? Who was going to tell them their kids would never come home? Who was going to tell them that while their sons and daughters had died out here – killed by American military issue Stark weapons – there was a ransom call for Tony Stark.

He remembered drifting in and out of consciousness when a video had been made.

Surely that was about ransom and threats?

Surely that meant someone knew he was still alive?

Surely someone was coming?

Or did had he dreamed that?

He couldn't rely on it.

'Mass murderer' the insurgents' leader had called him – right after he'd slaughtered a whole convoy and imprisoned him here. Apparently the irony had been lost on _him_. 

“Families are mourning everywhere,” his companion said cryptically.

The meaning was clear. Tony had done just as much as the men on the other side of their heavy steel prison door to make them mourn. 

_Steve would never have stood for this_ , his father's proud voice said in his mind. _He would have stood up, taken his shield and put a stop to it single-handedly._

_I'm sure he had no car battery attached to his fucking chest keeping his heart beating._

_He was a stubborn shrimp of a boy from Brooklyn without money or opportunities, but with guts and the heart in the right place. That's what made him._

Even all these years after his father's death, Tony argued with him in his head like this. It could still make him feel hollow and empty to remember how much of a disappointment he'd been to the business shark and war hero. But right now there was no drink in reach to numb the pain of the memory and of the physical wounds that were throbbing.

He would have to find another way to distract himself.

 _Fuck you, dad_ , he thought. _I'm not going to waste away here. I'll get out. And then I'm going to make this right or die trying._

First things first.

First he had to save himself. 

He looked at the battery, the generator, thought about his father's proud face whenever he relayed one outrageous war story or another. 

First Tony needed to improvise.

An energy source that would afford him some freedom of movement and a guarantee of prolonged existence. Something that wouldn't kill him next time he was water boarded.

Oh bliss.

How had he come from looking forward to taking an old car apart and putting it together better to planning ahead to surviving his next torture session?

* * *

He relayed no details of what he was building until he was sure he could trust his fellow prisoner. Yinsen – that was his name – took it in stride and slipped into the place of willing assistant without asking too many questions. 

Tony felt only a slight pang of guilt when he heard the story of their first meeting and the impression Tony had made.

“How does it feel to have control ripped from you like this? ” Yinsen asked when Tony was putting the finishing touches on the arc reactor under the man's watchful gaze.

“Control?” Tony asked back. They'd been screamed at in three languages to finally get to the real work just half an hour ago and it was only a matter of time till someone noticed he hadn't yet started building the requested weapons. He needed to be smart about his next moves. “You met a rambling drunk in Geneva. Does that scream control to you?” 

That was more honesty than he afforded most people.

Stuck here together, he felt Yinsen deserved some truth. The man was worried for his family, and must be feeling so much resentment for the billionaire who in his eyes hadn't done anything worthwhile with his brilliance and money.

Yinsen seemed to mull that over and then made a helpless shrugging gesture and said: “Funny how much easier it is to judge things from our own pool of experiences than it is to look behind he facade.”

Tony shrugged, because he had cultivated his image over the years to the point where it was hard to tell even for him where the disguise started and the the real Tony ended. 

That night he asked for Yinsen's help to put the arc reactor in place. His mind was still putting together the next steps in his escape plan, but everything hinged on the arc reactor. The energy source was working. Now it needed to free him from the battery.

“It'll be uncomfortable. I'll have to pull out the magnet for a moment to attach this.”

“Alright, just do it.”

Tony sat down on a broken wheelbarrow they'd turned into a sort of armchair and let Yinsen do his work with steady hands and disinfectant. 

“It will pull some of the skin off.”

“Cool,” Tony said. He hated being in pain, but pain had become part of his existence. He could take it. After all this was just another step towards the real work he had to do to get them out of here.

The arc reactor worked.

It would power the magnet and keep him alive.

It could power so much more though. And it would.

“Talk,” Yinsen instructed as if it was that easy to talk yourself through the feeling of going into cardiac arrest. “Take your mind off this.” 

“Talk? About what?”

“A happy memory.”

He froze more from the idea than the pain. There weren't many of those. “When I was six, my parents gave me a Captain America shield made from sturdy plastic. It was real shiny and I loved it. For three month I ran around the house pretending to be a super soldier. It was my favorite toy.”

His father, who usually had no time and sympathy for Tony behaving like the kid he was, had even played with him a couple of times – hiding under the stairs and jumping out at him like a viscous fiend and play fighting little six year old make-believe Cap. To this day Tony remembered his mother's clear, bell like laughter when she found them defending the entrance hall against intruders and the happy twinkle in her blue eyes when Tony told her of their adventures. Howard taking time to play with Tony had been such a rarity. 

“My dad pretended he was a monster and I fought him with nothing but the shield. He was very proud that he'd made it back during the war.”

Yinsen was still working away on Tony's chest and Tony tried not to look down at what he was doing. The exact moment when the magnet snapped back into place gave Tony so much relief that he took a deep breath that hurt his lungs. A coughing fit was his reward.

Pausing his ministrations until Tony had calmed his breathing, Yinsen sat back to ask: “You fought with a shield?”

He wondered how much people who grew up out here knew about Cap and the lore of his heroics. Tony had loved hearing all about the man and his deeds, right until he realized that his father was more interested in finding Steve Rogers and what was left of him than he was in spending time with his own son. Part of Tony that was still the hurt little boy from then had never forgiven him for that.

“Yeah, like Cap. The shield was the only weapon Captain America used in the war.”

“A shield isn't exactly a weapon.”

Tony smiled and said: “Neither is an armor.”

Yinsen looked at him questioningly and then pulled back as the arc reactor took over and Tony was once again safe. 

“An armor and shield? Like a knight?”

With the magnet working he felt better immediately. 

The arc reactor was in place.

It worked.

Now Tony had a plan.

And for the first time in years the thought of Captain America was giving him comfort.

But _this knight_ was going to shape his tool of combat with his own hands.

“Come on,” Tony said. “We have work to do.”

He was ready to trust Yinsen with it. After all he owed him twice over to do everything in his power to get him back to his family.

And even if none of this would have made a difference to Howard Stark, Tony had a feeling that if Steve Rogers were around to see his next move, he'd be impressed.

**Author's Note:**

> You can follow me for fic updates on [tumblr](https://navaanwrites.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/navaanwrites). This fic has a post on the tumblr [here](https://navaanwrites.tumblr.com/post/172411721304/choose-your-weapons-navaan-iron-man-movies) in case you want to share it. It also has a page on my [Dreamwidth](https://navaan.dreamwidth.org/599906.html).


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